From The Guardian readers' letters page:
Nuclear power is helping to drive the climate crisis
Has the Confederation of British Industry got its head in the sand, or in the record levels of carbon-intensive concrete just poured at the Hinkley C nuclear site (Build more nuclear reactors to help climate crisis, says CBI, 28 June)?
Nuclear power, apart from destroying biodiversity throughout its life cycle, produces up to 37 times the CO2 emissions of renewable energy sources, owing partly to the mining and refining of uranium. The impact of this process on people and the environment is not included in the rationale for nuclear power in the UK...
Linda Rogers, PAWB (Pobl Atal Wylfa B/People Against Wylfa B)
Let's go with the prevailing narrative that today's temperatures are outside the normal range of fluctuations for the past hundred (or thousand, or whatever) years, and that carbon dioxide is causing them - and focus on that "37 times" number.
I don't know what she means by 'renewable energy', but presumably the net carbon dioxide emissions from these is close to zero - thirty-seven times close to zero is still a small number, and surely a few orders of magnitude less burning oil or gas (coal is hardly used any more in the UK).
Therefore, the headline that "Nuclear power is helping to drive the climate crisis" is nonsense. By all means, oppose it for other reasons (rightly or wrongly), but please accept that overall, it reduces carbon dioxide emissions.
Wednesday, 3 July 2019
Diagonal Comparison
My latest blogpost: Diagonal ComparisonTweet this! Posted by Mark Wadsworth at 22:19
Labels: global warming, Logic, Maths
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23 comments:
In fact the The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change puts nuclear below solar and wind in terms of lifecycle C02 output per Kw/h produced.
Its a shame the Guardian concludes in the perpetuation of such harmful lies.
Apart from anything else, a nuclear plant will produce reliable base-load power for what 40, 50 years...?
A wind farm which also uses thousands of tonnes of concrete for the bases has a degrading output from day #1 and will last... what 15 years...?
The Grouniad, wrong about everything all of the time.
B, thanks, I was prepared to take at the claim at face value.
B, exactly, but one wind turbine only uses a tiny fraction of the amount of concrete used in a nuclear power station. But then again, a nuclear power station will run more or less forever if you look after it.
I would love to see her sums
LF - her what?
@ MW "exactly, but one wind turbine only uses a tiny fraction of the amount of concrete used in a nuclear power station. But then again, a nuclear power station will run more or less forever if you look after it."
Well yes, but they never build one do they - they tend o come in hundreds...
Where I live (in Cyprus) I can see 41 of the damn things - and the concrete bases are vast. Then of course there are access roads, and pylons to get the electricity from the wind farm to the grid.
It would be fascinating to know exactly how much concrete a large wind farm actually uses...
B, this is a fascinating topic. I suppose we should compare on the basis of units of energy produced divided by amount of concrete. But I have no idea how it would pan out. Shall we call it a score draw?
I meant I would love to see her working outs - what assumptions etc she made.
"The idiot is making a load of unsubstantiated assertions. What hard evidence does she have for any of them?"
Why do you need hard evidence when you have faith?
The Fukushima clean up involved the removal of 16.5 million cubic metres of top soil from an area the size of Wales, employed 31.6 Million workers and cost £22 Billion, and there were 100 Thousand evacuees, some now returning in some areas. Source Japan Government Ministry of the Environment.
http://josen.env.go.jp/en/pdf/progressseet_progress_on_cleanup_efforts.pdf and
http://josen.env.go.jp/en/pdf/environmental_remediation_1905.pdf
http://josen.env.go.jp/en/
@Dinero
What about the 1975 Banqiao Dam flood - Unofficial estimates of the number of people killed by the disaster have run as high as 230,000 people
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam#1975_Banqiao_Dam_flood
For a windmill to generate electricity it needs magnets and the these magnets are made from neodymium, a rare earth. The environmental impact of mining rare earths and separating the one you want from the ones you don't (because rare earths always come combined in the same ores and it takes a series of processes involving nasty acids to split them out) must surely outweigh the environmental impact of mining uranium. Interestingly, uranium is often found in rare earth deposits.
@D
"employed 31.6 Million workers" Bullshit Stat there old son.
B, LF, G, the problem with these comparisons is that most people make up their minds what kind of power they prefer and then tweak the figures to suit, be it supporters of nuclear, gas, windmill, wood pellets, solar panels, whatever.
But in her case, the figure 37 is plucked out of the air and we don't know what the comparison is.
Din, it says 13.6 million workers. That's 10% of the Japanese population (or some similarly large number), seems high but more plausible than one quarter of the population!
Sh, it's a meaningless calculation anyway. £22 bn divided by 13.6 million is £1,600. Did these 13.6 million work full time on it for a whole year? Or did they employ local labour for a week or two in each area? Japanese workers are paid about the same as UK workers, so the latter seems plausible.
Sh, there are two things with an area the size of Wales - Wales and Israel.
Mark, but you have to guard against the tendency to look at the downstream impacts - running costs, ongoing generation and maintenance - with no regard to the set up costs, mining and refining rare earths, building grid connections, upgrading the local grid to charge electric vehicles etc
It is important to look at whole life costs, especially when what looks like a good thing in terms of running costs incurs massive set up costs and despoils the environment in areas that Guardian readers don't live in and would not dream of visiting
I was reading today, wish I could remember where, an article about how the Orkney islands generate more renewable energy than they can use but their energy costs are higher than the average. As I recall, the author did not make the obvious inference that usage and generation have to synchronise. Generation without usage is pointless. Usage without generation is much more annoying. Demand matching is a concept that a lot of greenies don't seem to recognise
G, like I said, people will never agree on what is the right way of calculating and comparing costs, people pick and choose.
You for example, think windmills are ugly and give weight to that. Other people (me included) think they are quite beautiful but wouldn't give that any particular weight. It's highly subjective and irrelevant; what matters is actual costs - but do we just look at pence per kWh? Do we consider damage caused by mining in countries thousands of miles away? Do we even believe that CO2 emissions are a 'cost' (and I don't)?
Most people think electricity pylons are ugly, but they are entirely necessary, so there's no point liking or disliking them (I don't like them aesthetically, but I love what they represent).
And so on.
> Mark
It says 18 Million plus 13.6 Million for the areas that totals to 31.6 million.
> Shiney
It says 18 Million plus 13.6 Million for the areas that totals to 31.6 million.
> Shiney
It says an area of 24,000 km²
Not sure I ever said that windmills are ugly! But, yes, maritime windfarms do look ugly and I wonder what would happen if an oil tanker were to crash into one of these farms. However there may well be signs that they are killing sea birds
Din, maybe I misread.
G, again, those are factors to be taken into account, what probability, cost, weight should a neutral third party attach to them?
@D
You said (which I quoted)...... 'employed 31.6 Million workers and cost £22 Billion'....
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